Friday, 17 May 2013

Effects pt 1

There a lot of different effects and things, and the quick
ones I tend not to type up, but here are a few that I’ve done over the past
couple of weeks.

I’ve added leaves falling from trees. This uses a
mesh-emitter. I was not able to control the fall of the leaves as I would have
liked using UDK’s Cascade editor, so instead I made the material offset the
leaf as it falls.

I’ve tone-balanced all the shaders to look correct during
the day and night. I also started work on the postprocessing effect. It colourises
the scene slightly based on time of day and time of year so that day is warmer,
night is colder, spring is greener, summer is yellower, autumn is oranger and
winter is bluer. These are obviously “fakes”, but help to give a bit of
atmosphere.

The postprocessing effect also now adds fog in the morning,
which is particularly dense during winter. For the moment this effect is
entirely in postprocessing, but I’d like to add ground mist throughout the
level to compliment the depth-based whiting.

Also in postprocessing now is heat haze. This essentially
offsets the position of pixels based on depth and height. Although I couldn’t
get actual world height, I’m using screen position to fudge it, and I don’t
think most people will notice. To get the rippling effect I’m just using the
same normal map as my water texture, panning upwards, and it is the red and
green channels which drive the offset.

Relying entirely on the sun to cast the light makes
interesting lighting quite difficult, so I decided to add torches to the level.
I’m partway through making the torch and bracket model, but I’ve started
placing warm, flickering lights throughout the level and they really help to
add interest, particularly at night, and they contrast nicely with the cool
night-time tones. I’ll obviously need to make a flame visual effect, which I’m
looking forward to. I’m hoping to add a cool visual effect for the torchlight
bouncing off the rain if I have time to add rain, but rain is starting to look
like a low priority with all the stuff that *needs* to be done.